Crusader's Cross

chapter TWENTY-THREE

Jimmie told me all this late Tuesday afternoon, at my house, just after arriving back in New Iberia. Outside, the sunlight was gold inside the trees, more like autumn than late summer, and there was a tannic smell in the air that I only associated with fall and the coming of winter. I could hear Molly nailing up a birdhouse that had been blown out of live oak, like a reassuring presence who told me I still had another season to run.

"So Ida and Lou Kale have been in the prostitution business ever since?" I said.

"More or less," he replied. "You actually married a nun?"

"Stick to the subject. Both of us have felt guilty all these years about a woman who didn't have the courtesy to drop a postcard indicating she was alive. Do you feel like you've been had, maybe just a little bit?"

"What do you guys say at meetings? Live and let live?" he said.

"She was Raphael Chalons's punch?"

"More than that," he said. We were in the guest bedroom, where he was packing his clothes in a suitcase, preparing to move to an apartment he planned to use while he supervised the reconstruction of our destroyed home south of town. "She had a kid. Almost nine months to the day after Chalons rescued her at that farmhouse."

"What happened to the kid?"

"Guess?"

I stared at his back as he bent over his suitcase, arranging his shirts and balled-up socks. "Valentine Chalons?" I said.

"That's the way I'd read it." He straightened up, his long-sleeve white shirt still fresh and clean, even after a long drive from New Orleans through heavy traffic.

"And Raphael Chalons raised him? And that's what all this bullshit has been about – the Chalons family doesn't want anyone to know Val's mother was a prostitute?"

"You don't buy it?" Jimmie said.

"No."

"Why not?" he asked.

"The old man doesn't care what anybody thinks of him."

"Maybe Val does."

"It's something else."

"Why not ask Ida?" he said.

"I don't plan on seeing Ida."

"You might see her whether you want to or not. She's in New Orleans. I put her up at a friend's house on the lake."

"Don't you ever tire of grief?" I said.

"She wants to see her son. Whores have souls, too," he replied.

"What was the cost of a postage stamp in 1958?" I said.

He straightened up from packing his suitcase and looked at me, a ray of sunlight falling across his prosthetic eye, which remained fixed and staring in the socket, like the eye of a stranger. "Thanks for the use of the room," he said.

That night the temperature dropped suddenly and chains of dry lightning pulsed inside the clouds, flooding our yard with a white brilliance that turned the tree trunks the pale color of old bone. On the edges of sleep I kept waiting to hear the small pet door in the back entrance swing on its hinges, signaling that Snuggs and Tripod had sought shelter from the impending storm. I got up and pushed open the back door and immediately felt the weight of a tree branch that had fallen on the steps. I cleared it away and went out into the yard in my skivvies, the canopy flickering whitely above my head. Both Snuggs and Tripod were inside the hutch, which I left open at night so Tripod could come and go as he wished.

"Let's go, fellows," I said, and hefted up one in each arm. They both lay back against the crook of my arms, content, enjoying the ride, their feet in the air, heavy and compact as cannon balls.

Then at the corner of my vision I saw a shadow move behind a row of camellia bushes in my side yard. I started to turn my head but instead looked straight ahead and went inside the house. I removed my.45 from the dresser drawer and, still in my skivvies, went out the front door and circled around the side of the house.

Lightning rolled silently through the clouds overhead, flaring suddenly in a yellow ball, as though igniting a trapped pocket of white gas inside each individual cloud. "Come out," I called to the darkness.

The wind gusted off the bayou and all the shadows in the yard thrashed against one another except one. A figure stood at the rear of my property, his silhouette framed against the bands of light on the bayou's surface.

"I can drop you from here," I said.

The figure hesitated, measuring his chances, a sheaf of compacted leaves cracking under his weight. Then a tremendous explosion of thunder shook the trees, the electricity died in the clouds, and the figure's silhouette disappeared inside the shadows.

A voyeur? A disoriented reveler from one of the bars downtown? An imaginary visitor from a sea of elephant grass in a forgotten war? It was possible. I searched along the bank of the bayou and saw no footprints, although someone had recently broken down a banana tree on the edge of my neighbor's property.

I called in a 911 and lay back down. Molly had slept through it all. Those who live with insomnia and who consider sleep both an enemy and a gift will understand the following. Some of us cannot comprehend how anyone except the very good or those who have no conscience at all can sleep from dark to dawn without dreaming or waking. We hear William Blake's tiger padding softly through a green jungle, his stripes glowing, his whiskers spotted with gore. Psychoanalysis does no good. Neither does a health regimen that induces physical exhaustion. The only solution that is guaranteed is the one provided by our old friend Morpheus, who requires our souls in the bargain.

Audie Murphy, the most decorated United States soldier of World War II, slept with a.45 under his pillow for twenty years. Ernest Hemingway slept with a night-light on all of his adult life.

But I sleep with Molly Robicheaux, I told myself. I sleep inside her goodness, the smell of her hair, the flush of her skin when I touch her rump and kiss the baby fat on her sides. I sleep inside a flowerlike odor that she leaves on the pillow. Let the devil have prowling tigers and the shadows in the yard.

The next day I assembled all the investigative material I could on the case of the Baton Rouge serial killer. I still believed the murder of Honoria Chalons was not related. But I had also believed Honoria was an incest victim, and that perhaps her brother was the predator, since she had died in his quarters. There was no doubt this was what I wanted to believe because I had come to personally despise Val Chalons and the self-righteous sneering arrogance that he represented. Unfortunately for me, the DNA evidence taken off Honoria's body pointed away from Val Chalons as a current sexual partner and possible suspect in his sister's death.

Koko Hebert had said a small cross had been incised postmortem inside Honoria's hairline, forcing us to conclude the killer had not acted randomly and that he bore the Chalons family an enormous animus.

But the Chalons's coat of arms hung in Val's quarters as well as in the main house. In the past, the Baton Rouge serial killer had already demonstrated his proclivity and skill at making others besides his immediate victim suffer as long as possible. He made sure the rest of us knew he had sexually degraded the victim before killing her. He left the instruments of bondage and torture with the body. He mutilated the features after death. He hung a purse in a tree to ensure we would find his handiwork while it was still fresh. Why not mock the Chalons family by lifting the Cross of Jesus from their family seal, then leaving it as an insult to be discovered hours later by the probing fingers of a parish coroner?

But I still couldn't figure out Val Chalons. Had he hired Bad Texas Bob Cobb through intermediaries to cancel my ticket and Clete's as well, just to hide the fact he was illegitimate? It didn't seem plausible.

Over the years I had known many people of his background. They revised the past on a daily basis and lived vicariously through their dead ancestors. Inside termite-eaten historical homes, they stayed drunk and talked endlessly of a grander time and thought of themselves as characters in a Greek tragedy. In their own minds, they were not dissolute or effete but simply bacchanal eccentrics living in an intolerable century. They absolved themselves of their own sins, believing them to be the price one paid for the gift of gentility. Robert Lee had long ago proved that penury and failure could be borne with the dignity of a battle-stained flag. They were not bad people and meant no harm to anyone, not unless you counted the loss they imposed upon themselves.

But my objectivity was gone and I couldn't sort any of these things out. My anger toward Val Chalons had helped me get drunk once and I was sure my next slip would probably be my last. Maybe it was time to take it to Val on a different level, one that he would not be expecting.

I went to his home after work and was told by the handyman that Valentine was having dinner with friends at Clementine's in New Iberia. I drove back to town and parked by the bayou and entered the supper club through the terrace. Clementine's was once a saloon and pool hall called Provost's, a workingman's place with a sports wire and green sawdust and scrolls of ticker tape on the floor. On Thursday nights the owner covered the pool tables with dropcloths and served free sausage and robin gumbo. Those things are gone, but the cavernous rooms, the stamped tin ceilings, and the hand-carved mahogany bar remain. In the shadowy light I could almost see the ghost of my father. Big Aldous, knocking back two inches of Jack at the bar, bellowing at his own jokes, his pinstripe strap overalls still spotted with drilling mud.

I ordered coffee at the end of the bar, where I could see through a wide door into the dining room. Val was with a group of well-dressed people, his back to me. He was the only man at the table without a jacket. His hair had just been barbered, the sides clipped close to the head, which accented the severity of his angular features. He wore a starched white shirt, but without a tie and with the collar unbuttoned, as though he were demonstrating a deliberate disregard for the decorum of the evening. The austerity in his expression and posture made me think of a photograph I had once seen of the Confederate guerrilla leader, William Clarke Quantrill.

In fact, I think he was assuming a persona I had seen him play before. He had been a guest narrator on a Louisiana Public Television broadcast regarding the activities of the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction. He had spoken of his ancestors' participation in the White League with veiled pride, even dismissing their moral culpability for the execution of fifty black soldiers in what came to be known as the Colfax Massacre. "It was a violent era. My great-grandfather did what he had to. It's facile to impose our standards on the past," Val had explained.

Now, in the glow of candlelight at his table, he was holding forth about contemporary wars, his rhetoric threaded with moral certitude, although he himself had never heard a shot fired in anger.

I had resolved earlier to approach Val Chalons with a new and objective attitude. But my thought processes were deteriorating rapidly. I saw him excuse himself from the table and walk through the back hall toward the restrooms, which were housed on the terrace.

Don't confront him here, not in this state of mind, I told myself.

But if not here, where? Val Chalons wouldn't change and I wouldn't, either. Just stick to principles and keep personalities out of it, I thought. The fate of the world didn't hang on what I might say to a member of the Chalons family.

As chance would have it, Clete Purcel came through the front door, just as I got up from the bar stool. "Where you going?" he asked.

"To the head," I replied.

"Did I just see Val Chalons?"

"Maybe," I said.

"Why waste your time bird-dogging a bucket of shit?"

"I dropped in for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie."

"Yeah, I used to go on skivvy runs in Cherry Alley to play the piano. Let me handle this, Streak."

"There's no problem here. Stay out of it," I replied.

I followed Chalons out onto the terrace, into a fragrance of flowers and bourbon and grilled steaks and the fecund summertime odor of the Teche. He was at the urinal when I entered the restroom.

"Unless you're in here to hang out your dick, I suggest you leave," he said.

"You seem to have many personalities, Val," I said.

"Don't think your current environment protects you, Robicheaux. I'm going to boil you in your own grease."

He continued to urinate, his chin tilted slightly upward, his fingers cupped under his phallus.

"I think there's reason to believe your sister may have been murdered by the Baton Rouge serial killer," I said. "I had dismissed that possibility because I was carrying a personal resentment against you. I was wrong in doing that, both as a police officer and as an AA member."

He laughed to himself and shook off his phallus. "God, I love you people," he said.

"Which people is that, Val?"

"Guys who constantly confess their guilt in public with doleful faces. Why is it I always feel you're up to something?" He brushed past me and began washing his hands in the basin.

"It's called 'transfer.' The person assumes other people think in the same duplicitous fashion as himself," I said.

"You still don't get it, do you?" he said, drying his hands on a paper towel.

"Get what?"

"You're our local Attila. A little campfire smoke and animal grease in your hair and you'd be perfect. You're shit, Robicheaux. So is your wife. She's a poseur and a cunt. You just haven't figured it out yet."

He was standing within arm's reach of me now. He balled up the paper towel and dropped it in the waste can. I started to speak, but instead stepped back from him and looked into empty space, my thumbs hooked into the sides of my belt. The heavy metal door slammed behind him.

Don't take the bait, I told myself.

But there are instances when that old-time rock 'n' roll is the only music on the jukebox.

I followed Val Chalons through the bar area into the dining room. He had taken his chair and was spreading his napkin on his lap. His friends looked up at me, expecting to be introduced.

"We finally got to the bottom of Ida Durbin's disappearance, Val," I said. "Your father rescued her from a whorehouse he had money in. So out of either obligation or reasons of opportunity, Ida became his regular punch. Then you came along about nine months later. If you'd like to check out the story, your mother is staying with a friend of my brother on Lake Pontchartrain. Your mother is married to her former pimp, Lou Kale. They run an escort service together in Miami."

He rose from his chair and threw his martini in my face. I hit him high up on the cheekbone, so hard that his opposite eye bulged from the socket. He crashed through empty chairs into the wall, then caught me with a sliding blow on the forehead and one on the ear that I could feel burn right through the cartilage into the bone. But he was off balance, his feet tangled up by an oil painting that had clattered to the floor. I slipped his next punch, felt another glance off my head, then got under his reach and hooked him just below the heart. He wasn't ready for it and I saw his mouth drop open and heard a sound like a dying animal's come from deep inside his chest.

People from the bar crowded through the entranceway to watch. A waiter's loaded tray exploded on the floor and I saw a strobe light flare in the gloom and burn away all the shadows in the room. I hooked Val Chalons in the eye, then drove a right cross directly into his mouth, bursting his lips against his teeth. I knew it was time to back away, in the same way a fighter in the ring knows when he has taken his opponent's heart. A woman I had never seen was screaming incoherently and an elderly man was patting the air with his hands, as though his years had given him the power to impart wisdom and restraint to a dervish.

I started to step back, but Val Chalons tried to clench me, his mouth draining blood and spittle on my cheek and neck, the thickness of his phallus pressing against me. He forced us both against a table, his mouth as close to my ear as a lover's. "My father screwed your wife, Robicheaux," he said.

In my naivete, I had believed the succubus that had governed my life for decades had been exorcised by the coming of old age. But it was still there, like a feral presence hiding in the subconscious, red-black in color, shiny with glandular fluids, waiting for the right moment to have its way. Some call it a chemical assault upon the brain. I can't say what it is. But the consequence for me was always the same: I committed acts as though I were watching them on film rather than participating in them. When it was over, I was not only filled with disgust and shame and self-loathing but genuinely frightened by the gargoyle that held sway over my soul.

In this case, that meant I genuinely invested myself in the deconstruction of Val Chalons. I buried my fist up to my wrist in his stomach and drove his head into the wall, clubbed him to the floor, and stomped his face when he was down. Then I felt Clete Purcel's huge arms lock around me, pinning my hands at my sides, dragging me backward through the tables and broken dishware and spilled food into the bar area, where someone pointed a camera strobe straight into my eyes.

Like a drowning man who has just popped to the surface of a vortex that has crushed his hearing, I saw Clete's lips moving without sound, then heard his words become audible in midsentence: "… took us upcountry into Shitsville, Streak. Why you'd have to load their gun? Why you'd do it, big mon?"